Be With Me
by LadySilver
Summary: Melissa's pregnant, and that's not the worst of it. AU(ish). Melissa/Bobby.


_A/N: For angst bingo prompt: _pregnancy _and for Teen Wolf bingo prompt: _Melissa - pregnancy.

**Be With Me**

"…I'm pregnant," Melissa told them, then took a deep breath and held it while waiting to see what would happen next.

Scott had been perched on the edge of the armchair, his knees bouncing in his eagerness to be released. Melissa had interrupted him on his way out the door to wherever he was spending his summer days with her request to talk. At her announcement, he slumped back into the chair, boneless, a seemingly loose pile of red cotton and blue denim against the floral fabric. "Wow," he breathed. "Really?"

Melissa bit her lip and nodded. The pregnancy test she'd taken at the hospital that morning had confirmed what she already knew but had been trying hard not to acknowledge. "Really," she stated. She ticked her gaze over to her boyfriend who was sitting in the other armchair, his face buried in his hands, elbows planted on his knees. This wasn't exactly how she's meant to break the news to him, but she knew that putting it off was only going to make things worse.

Scott sat up in his chair, the movement bringing Melissa's attention back to him. She saw his nostrils flare and his chest enlarge with an inhalation. He nodded once as if to himself. "So, that's what it was," he stated, not quite loud enough for it to require a response. "I wondered."

Melissa frowned, it taking her a second to realize that Scott had just _smelled_ her. Scott could smell the pregnancy. She felt herself growing self-conscious and had to fight the urge to go stand in front of the Glade Plug-In. "You smelled it on me?" she questioned. At the same time she glanced down at her stomach, where she already knew that there wasn't yet anything to see, especially under the loose-fitting rubber-ducky covered scrubs she had worn that day to work.

Scott nodded, looking vaguely chagrined. "It's not a bad thing, though. I mean, you don't smell bad. It's just different. Kind of like-" His face contorted as he realized that there was no way to save what he was trying to say from sounding insulting and he finished on a half-hearted, "Congratulations."

Melissa was saved from the need to make a response when Bobby pushed to his feet and paced across the breadth of carpet, only to spin around after a few steps. He came to a stop with his feet straddling the tasseled edge of carpet and the hardwood floor. In the bright summer light streaming in through the living room windows, he stood like a dark pillar. Then he asked the question that she'd been hoping they would all manage to skip over entirely: "Does the father know?"

Scott gasped and made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a growl. His fingers gripped the arms on the chair, clenched tight. With a push, he levered himself to his feet and took a threatening step toward the person who happened to be his coach, his teacher, _and_ his mother's improbable boyfriend.

Though he hadn't said anything out loud, Melissa knew that Scott was struggling with the multiple roles he now had to view Bobby Finstock in. There was a lot she didn't know how to read about her son anymore, but the consternation that her dating life caused him would never be lost on her. That he now had yet another role to view Bobby in was pushing Scott's adaptability. "Why would you ask that?" Scott demanded. "Why would you just assume that—" He blanched, but kept going. The vein in his forehead throbbed. "—_you're_ not the father? I thought you were better than that!"

"It's OK, Scott," Melissa answered, waving him down. "It's a fair question."

"What's fair about it?" Scott shot back. "You two have been dating for, like, months and it's only been in the last couple of weeks that I noticed anything—"

"Sit down, McCall," Bobby interrupted, his Coach voice full on. Remarkably, Scott obeyed. "As your mother already knows, I can't have kids."

Scott's eyebrows quirked up in question.

Bobby shoved his hands into the pockets of his navy tracksuit before continuing, "Frostbite has serious consequences and is not something to be laughed at, no matter how much my former college roommate thinks otherwise." He stopped, tilted his head like he was just now making a connection that had teased him and added, "Peer pressure, also. Don't give in to peer pressure. You think you're just getting up to some innocent mischief in the woods and the next thing you know-" He sliced his finger across his waist with a _thwip_ sound-effect.

Scott winced and dropped his eyes, the confrontation in them giving away to something more like sympathy. It was a strange expression and one Melissa was curious to learn more about. But, that would have to wait.

Turning back to Bobby, Melissa replied, "No, the father doesn't know. And I'm not planning on telling him, either." Under her breath, she added, "I couldn't if I wanted to.

"I'm so sorry, Bobby," Melissa continued. "I know this isn't what you signed on for and I'll understand if you want to break things off." She sucked her lower lip back, her resolve a lot more tenuous than her words would suggest.

Bobby looked momentarily put-back. He ruffled his hair, mussing it. "Just because I can't have kids doesn't mean I don't want 'em," he pointed out. "What do you mean you couldn't tell the father if you wanted to?"

"You heard that?" Melissa asked.

"I did," Scott answered, peeking up through his eyelashes at her.

If Melissa had been sitting closer to her son, she would have knocked him upside the head for that. Instead, she rolled her eyes. "Oh, _now_ your ears work when I say something," she quipped. "Where was that power yesterday when I asked you to clean your room?"

Scott offered a half-shrug of non-apology. "I heard you; I just didn't want to."

Melissa threw her hands up in mock exasperation. "And now I'm in for another 18 years of this. Just when I thought it was safe to start leaving the outlets unguarded."

"Hey!" Scott cried in mock-affront. "I was a great kid."

Melissa sobered. He had been, and he still was. She'd been warned when he was a baby not to try for a second one because she'd never get another one as easy-going as Scott had been. Any problems between them lately were all on her end. Only during those unguarded moments where they slipped back into their routines did she realize how strained things had become. "It's going to be a big adjustment, you know. Having a baby in the house is a lot of work."

"So you're going to, you know, to…keep it?" Scott asked, grimacing through the whole question. His face flushed with crimson and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

Melissa nodded. "I support women's right to choose," she explained, "but it's not a choice I could make for me. I couldn't make it the first time when I—" She slapped her hands over her mouth, horrified at herself for making such a slip. "Oh, Scott, I'm sorry," she added, the words muffled and inadequate, yet the best she could manage. She'd practiced telling her son and her boyfriend about the pregnancy throughout her whole shift, running through every possible version in her head. Naturally the real version had its own designs.

Scott offered a wan smile. "It's OK, Mom. I've done the math." Perking up, he added, "Besides, it's not like I haven't always wanted a little brother or sister."

"Guys can be bastards," Bobby interjected. He paced back onto the carpet, regaining the full-lighting of his form. Though his shoulders and back were tensed, he seemed concerned rather than angry. "If you think it's not safe to tell the father, then I won't push you to. If it were me—well, it wouldn't be me, because I'm not that kind of asshole—but if it were me, I'd want to know."

"I would. I tried. It was a one-time thing. Before you and me," Melissa said, gesturing between them. While Bobby hadn't questioned the timing at all, had not once even suggested that she'd cheated on him—which she would always be grateful for, no matter what other decisions he made; she couldn't remember the last time she'd had a relationship with that level of trust in it—she still needed him to understand. "I was lonely and he seemed so charming. I…tried calling him afterward…" She trailed off and shrugged with splayed, helpless hands.

Scott ran the math again, his expression taking on a dawning horror as he figured out whom Melissa had been talking about. "Mom, you don't mean Peter Hale?" he asked in a squeak.

Melissa was shaking her head before Scott finished saying the name, and then her brain separated the first name from the last, and all of a sudden nothing made sense in that way where she knew it was the truth. "His name was Peter," she answered.

The room abruptly felt too small, the air too close and warm. She needed to get up and open a window, try to let in a breeze, but she couldn't get her legs to move. Peter had ignored her calls, evaded her efforts to find him—and had that been his goal all along? Is that why he'd given her a fake name, because he certainly hadn't used Hale? She would have recognized that name. And, if that had been him, how had she not recognized the person? God knew that she'd spent enough hours in the long-term wing attending the catatonic burn patient with that name.

Her mind began whirling with questions, each presenting even more questions as she tried to deny that the perfectly healthy man she'd spent one night with all those weeks ago had been the same as the helpless, ruined one who'd occupied a permanent place in her hospital. It had to be a con, a setup that she had walked right into.

Despite all the details that didn't add up, she couldn't shake one question: What kind of person was she to fall for such a ruse?

She expected that to be Scott's next question, and was thrown when instead the color drained from his face so fast that she thought he would pass out. One hand came to rest on his side, his fingers curled toward his back and indenting his red shirt. "Not him," he said. "Why him?"

"Scott," she said. She couldn't imagine why the man's name had brought this reaction. "I know it was a bad decision and I don't want you to think that one date is enough time to get to know someone-"

"It's—It's not that," Scott interrupted. He swallowed, his hand curling tighter into his shirt. "Peter's the one who bit me."

Melissa frowned as she tried to shift the context of what she knew to include Scott's comment. The tendons in his hand were sticking out from the strength of his grip and she felt her own arms coming again to cross over her lower stomach. The fabric of her scrub shirt brushed against the hairs of her arms and sent a chill through her body.

"Bit?" Bobby demanded, rounding suddenly on Scott. Melissa could see the moment when he'd put Scott's contributions to the conversation together. "We're not talking about some kind of—" He spun a hand in the air, the gesture adding a sarcastic twist to his question. "—vampire thing?"

"Werewolf," Scott answered absently before forcing himself to meet his mother's eyes. It was all Melissa could do not to look away; she had to remind herself that she was the grown woman in the room and, more importantly, the parent. "You won't be able to contact him. He's dead."

"How do you-? How would you-?" Melissa composed herself, forcing her back to straighten against the unconscious curl she'd been adopting and to ask yet another in an increasingly long list of questions she never thought she'd hear herself asking. "Did you kill him?"

Scott let out a harsh laugh that only ranked up the tension in the room. "No." Then, with a shake of his head, he added, "I wish."

Bobby hadn't moved since Scott's correction. He stood with his feet spread, his hands partially spread like he'd been interrupted on his way to making a dramatic point, his eyes widened. Abruptly, his arms fell and his eyes narrowed into a calculating squint. "If this Hale bit you—" He pointed at Scott. "—Then that would make him a werewolf, too, right?"

"Yes," Scott answered simply.

Bobby hummed to himself, looking thoughtful, then took up pacing across the floor again. To Melissa's surprise, he didn't walk right out of the room and the front door—though he easily could have. She wouldn't have blamed him one iota if he had.

Stroking his chin in a gesture that Melissa found oddly endearing, Bobby continued to process and pace in anticipatory silence. Only the sounds of his muted footsteps across the carpet giving way to the hollow ones on the wood and back again filled the room.

Melissa and Scott both watched him. By silent agreement, they suspended the rest of the conversation until they could get a read on where Bobby was going to fit into it.

_If_ he was going to fit into it.

"You're taking this well," Melissa commented, at last, for something to say, something to break the pattern. She tried not to remember how she'd taken the news. While she liked to think she was adjusting as well as could be, the helplessness she'd felt at learning that monsters were real and her child was one still awakened her at night sometimes in terror.

Bobby finally stopped and held up two fingers. "I've learned two things in my time on this planet: One, you gotta know how to roll with the punches, because there's always somebody out there trying to take a swing at you; and two…" He glanced off to the side as if the knots in the carpet's tassels encoded what he was thinking. "Never mind two," he continued a long second later. "Two's not important right now. The point is: if you can't roll with the punches, you're gonna spend your life getting knocked down.

"I'm also happy to learn that you haven't killed anyone, McCall. I'm not going to tell you how many times I wondered if that's what you and Stilinski were yammering about."

Scott blinked, clearly as confused about how to handle the response as Melissa was. She hadn't missed the twitching in the muscles around his mouth when he said he hadn't killed Peter. He hadn't, but not because he'd been unwilling to. Had he really become capable of that, she wondered? Had Peter changed her sweet, gentle son into a killer?

If he had, then it was a good thing that someone had gotten around to killing him before she could get her hands on him.

Gusting out a breath, Bobby continued, "Now that we've all aired our dark secrets, is there anything else anyone wants to confess to? Anything? Tax evasion? Aliens?" He peered with his intense hazel eyes back and forth from Melissa to Scott. Melissa shrugged. While there was no shortage of things she'd yet to tell Bobby about herself, none of them seemed to rank high enough to qualify for the challenge.

Scott jumped up suddenly, the motion sending Melissa scooting back into the couch as if to escape an onrushing attack.

"It's going to be a werewolf, too," Scott announced.

"What?" Melissa asked.

"The baby," Scott replied, sounding pained.

Bobby threw up his hands in resignation. "I had to ask."

Melissa ignored him, caught up as she was in confusion about Scott's decree. "Peter didn't bite me," she pointed out. At least, she didn't think he had. Wouldn't she have noticed that? How could her unborn baby be a werewolf? She could feel the warmth and closeness of the room again, the heat causing beads of sweat to roll in rivulets between her breasts and soak into her bra. "You said you had to be bitten to become a werewolf."

"_I_ was bitten." Scott raked a hand through his hair. "They can also be born. Oh, God. It's going to need an Alpha. A-a-and a pack."

_A werewolf_, Melissa thought. _Another one_. She swallowed back the urge to cry, felt new pricks of sweat form on the back of her neck. Feeding schedules and diapers, she could cope with. And, daycare. She was going to have to figure out how to fit daycare expenses into their already drum-tight budget.

Her mind flashed on an image of a newborn face, scrunched tight with anger, its eyes burning gold like she had seen Scott's once: Gold where brown was supposed to be.

A cold trickle slid down her spine.

"I would pretend to understand this," Bobby interjected, "if I didn't think you were getting ahead of yourselves…"

Melissa couldn't stand it anymore. She crossed to the window, grabbing a stray magazine from the coffee table on the way. Opening the window, she stood there in what little breeze the day had to offer, fanning herself. When she'd been pregnant with Scott, she'd spent the first two trimesters exhausted. Already it seemed that she'd been spending this pregnancy overheated.

Revulsion curled through her at the thought of the thing in her body: The inhuman thing that had been put there by the monster that had used her and attacked and changed her son. She wasn't even going to try to blame her urge to resurrect him just to kill him again on pregnancy hormones.

"We can do this, Mom," she heard Scott say. He sounded so resolute. Mature.

Bobby came up behind her, a reassuring presence despite his warmth. "Number two:" He put his hand on the small of her back, and she felt Scott come around to her other side. His eyes glimmered in a flash of sunlight through the window. "Always have people to back you up."

A breeze brushed across her exposed skin, cooling her, grounding her. Melissa shut her eyes and layered her hands over her lower belly. So much was different this time. She was already raising one werewolf who was becoming a fine young man, if she did say so herself. She had friends, maybe something more. She _could_ do this, she decided. She could handle whatever came next.

END


End file.
